Caught

Net on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Just joining me? Catch up on the Greyhound Summer story here.

It was an old photograph, a woman in a faded dress sitting on the steps in front of a mobile home. She had a feminine version of Sam’s smile and a warm hug that reached past the two boys she had her arms around and into me. Maybe it just seemed that that I knew what the hug would feel like because I could see so much of Sam in her. The boys were 10 or so. I recognized Sam and, of course, he was smiling. The other, slightly bigger, boy was frowning, a baseball clutched in one hand. I suspected he wasn’t keen on the idea of leaving his game for something as silly as a picture.

I ran my finger around the edge of the frame, studied the mobile home, and wondered if the picture was taken in this park. I tried to imagine what it must be like to live in the same place all your life. What would it be like to wake up every day to the attention of your own mother? I imagined if a woman put that much of herself into a child he would feel all that love wrapped around him like a security blanket. I fingered the knitted strands of the blanket around me, the yarn frayed, fuzzy with age, unraveling at the edge, old enough to have been knitted by the work-worn hands resting on each boy’s shoulder.

The pattern was a simple mix of three colors, worked over and over. I felt blank, empty on the inside when I tried to conjure an imagined presence of something like that in my life — the dedicated effort of one woman’s love, working on the project day after day from beginning to end. In comparison, I was a crazy quilt of cast off scraps, bits of time invested here and there. I might always be a patchwork, but I was determined to grow some roots. To sink them deep into a community I would never have to leave. I knew life with a music man was a rootless life. I knew this floating feeling I had with Sam wouldn’t last.

I heard Sam shuffling down the hall and put the picture back. I shifted in the chair, pulling my knees to my chest, hugging them close with the afghan draped around me like a fish net. A feeling of being caught fluttered in my stomach.